Magic bullet: the history of oral rehydration therapy.

In February 1994, the directors of major United Nations agencies, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, medical researchers, international health advocates and politicians gathered in Dacca, Bangladesh, to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of a life-saving technique known as oral rehydration therapy (ORT). UNICEF and the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research organized the meeting in order to recognize those who originally developed and promoted the therapy and to refocus attention on the continued underutilization of ORT throughout the world.' More than two decades earlier, in Dacca, East Pakistan, and Calcutta, India, many of the people who attended the meeting, along with others, had developed the use of an extraordinarily simple solution consisting of sugar, salts, and water to save the lives of severely dehydrated adults, children, and infants.2 These researchers, some of whom had not yet completed their medical residencies, were affiliated with powerful U.S. institutions including Johns Hopkins, Harvard, the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Navy, and the National Institutes for Health. In 1962 they began work on effective therapies for cholera-induced diarrhoea which was claiming thousands of lives globally during seasonal epidemics. Within six years, these men produced and synthesized physiological evidence tha4t overturned the medical establishment's paradigm for diarrhoeal treatment. Through determination, intuition, and serendipity, they developed a new therapy which proved effective in clinical trials. Before its promotion worldwide in the late 1970s, the majority of people with diarrhoeal dehydration had no access to effective treatment. ORT can be